Mary Bly
Encyclopedia
Mary Bly is a tenured associate professor of English Literature at Fordham University
Fordham University
Fordham University is a private, nonprofit, coeducational research university in the United States, with three campuses in and around New York City. It was founded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York in 1841 as St...

 who also writes best-selling Regency romance novels under the pen name Eloisa James.

She is the daughter of poet Robert Bly
Robert Bly
Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.-Life:Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving...

 and short-story author Carol Bly
Carol Bly
Carol Bly was a teacher and an award-winning American author of short stories, essays, and nonfiction works on writing...

.

Early years

Mary Bly was born in Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 in 1962, the daughter of Robert Bly
Robert Bly
Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.-Life:Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving...

, winner of the American Book Award
American Book Award
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre...

 for poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

, and Carol Bly
Carol Bly
Carol Bly was a teacher and an award-winning American author of short stories, essays, and nonfiction works on writing...

, a short story
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 author. She was the inspiration for her mother's essay "The Maternity Wing, Madison, Minnesota," which was published in the anthology Imagining Home: Writing From the Midwest. Her godfather, James Wright
James Wright (poet)
James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...

, wrote a poem especially for her, which he included in his Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

-winning Collected Poems. Bly has three younger siblings, Bridget, Noah, and Micah.

The Bly family did not own a television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

, but did own over 5000 books. Robert Bly often read to his children, choosing to expose them to classics such as Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...

instead of more traditional children's fare. Even at a young age, however, Mary Bly was fascinated with romance. To entertain her siblings during a snowstorm, she built a puppet show, complete with lights, that featured a romance. Several years later, after discovering the romance novel
Romance novel
The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late...

s of Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer was a British historical romance and detective fiction novelist. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story for her younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer...

 in her local library, Bly convinced her father to allow her to read one romance novel for each classic novel she read.

Academia

After graduating from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, Bly went on to attain an M.Phil. from Oxford University and a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in Renaissance studies from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. She is a tenured associate professor lecturing on William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 at Fordham University in New York City. She has served as Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department, as well as head of Fordham's Creative Writing Program. In addition to publishing an academic book with Oxford University Press, she has published an academic article on 17th century drama in The Publications of the Modern Language Association
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...

,
the most prestigious journal for English literary studies.

Romance Novelist

While attending the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...

 on a humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

 fellowship, Bly began writing romance novels. Her second career began when her husband wished to postpone having a second child until they had paid off their student loans. To speed the process, Bly followed her parents' examples and wrote a story to send to a publisher. Two publishers bid for that novel, Potent Pleasures, netting Bly an advance that paid off her student loans in full. As she was at the time an untenured professor about to publish her first academic work, Bly made the decision to publish her fiction books under a pseudonym, Eloisa James, out of fear that her colleagues would not take her seriously as an academic if they knew of her side writing. Her books have since been translated into 9 languages and have become hard-cover bestsellers in the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 and Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

. She has had 12 New York Times bestseller and 16 USAToday bestsellers.

Bly's first three novels, the Pleasures trilogy, were published in hardcover by Dell
Dell Publishing
Dell Publishing, an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte, Jr.During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Dell was one of the largest publishers of magazines, including pulp magazines. Their line of humor magazines included 1000 Jokes, launched in...

, a plan with which Bly did not fully agree. Following the publication of those three novels she bought out the remained of her contract and moved to Avon
Avon (publishers)
Avon Publications was an American paperback book and comic book publisher. As of 2010, it is an imprint of HarperCollins, publishing primarily romance novels.-History:...

, where her books are now published in mass market paperback format. She believed that marketing her first works as hardcovers was not a truly successful plan and hoped to have more success with the mass-market paperbacks.

Inspiration for her novels comes in part from her academic career, as plays or facts discovered during her academic research often spark ideas for fictional plots. Her novels, which are set in England's Regency period (1811–1820), often have references to Shakespeare or include pieces of 16th-century poetry or other tidbits she has found while researching her academic papers. As she spends much of her day teaching about or reading early British English, she feels that the language choices she makes in her novels are more authentic. Although Bly has attempted to write a contemporary romance, she chose not to finish the manuscript because of difficulty writing in a contemporary voice.

The characters in Bly's novels often dispense with the typical romance novel stereotypes, with the novels featuring female characters who are plump and even a hero who annulled a marriage because of impotence. Her heroines are usually surrounded by very good female friends or sisters, as Bly finds those relationships important in her own life. Most of her novels are part of a trilogy or set of four novels which focus on a set of interconnected characters, and explores the relationships between those characters as well as that of the hero and heroine.

Coming Out

For several years Bly's second career remained a secret, and she disguised herself by wearing contacts instead of her normal glasses when she attended functions as Eloisa James. After her first New York Times Bestseller in 2005, Bly realized that her readers liked her writing regardless of its genre, and that by keeping her identity a secret she was implying that she was ashamed of her work and of her readers. At a February 16, 2005 faculty meeting, Bly outed herself to her colleagues, revealing her alter ago and offering copies of her novels to her fellow professors. Once she had officially "come out", she submitted an op-ed to The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

defending the romance genre.

Juggling Dual Careers

Bly credits her success in dual careers to being "very, very organized." Lacking the time to write every day, Bly often writes upwards of 20 pages at a time. On her days at home, Bly schedules time to work on both her fiction and her academic works. When possible, she does not work when her children are at home. Bly usually does not teach in the summers, giving her more time do devote to her writing (both academic and fiction).

Her large workload leaves her little time to research some of the historical aspects for her novels. She has hired a research assistant to confirm details of topics she would like to include in a novel.

Family

Bly's father and stepmother, Ruth, are very supportive of her romance writing. Her mother, however, publicly wished that her efforts were focused towards more literary works. Despite that, Carol Bly also supported her daughter, contributing a "nifty crossword puzzle" to the Eloisa James website.

Bly is married to Alessandro Vettori, an Italian knight (or cavaliere) who is also a professor of Italian at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

, whom she met on a blind date while she was at Yale. They have a son and a daughter. The family live primarily in New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, but spend summers in Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

 visiting Alessandro's mother and sister.

Academic Works as Mary Bly

  • Consuming London: Mapping Plays, Puns, and Tourists in the Early Modern City

The Pleasures Trilogy


The Duchess Quartet


The Essex Sisters Series


The Desperate Duchesses Series


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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